Ex-Google employees break away to make their own things at Thing Labs

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What do you get when you put five former Google Inc. employees together with a few other talented programmers in a small office in San Francisco?

Some very interesting things.

Jason Shellen, founder of Thing Labs, launched Brizzly today after two months of the application spreading virally thanks to an invitation-only sign-up system similar to Gmail and Google Wave.

Brizzly is a well-executed ‘cloud’ software that merges users’ Twitter and Facebook profiles onto one page.

Unlike TweetDeck, which requires users to download two applications in order to make it work, Brizzly can be accessed from any computer that has a Web browser, and accounts stay in sync.

Brizzly has tens of thousands of users even before its official launch -- well, not so fast: it’s still in beta; sound like Google?

You’ll find a lot of Google mentality in Brizzly, which was built by a few of the engineers behind Google Reader, the dominant news feed aggregator.

To read our full story on Thing Labs, hop over to the Technology Blog: Betting that Brizzly will be huge, ex-Googlers are working on things.

-- Mark Milian